Revision and practice on the use of customer relationship management (CRM).
Key vocabulary: Pipeline Management, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Lead generation, Customer retention
CRM helps businesses track and manage their marketing efforts to turn potential interest into actual sales.
Example: a local gym runs a Facebook ad for a "Free 7-Day Pass". When you sign up online, your details go into the gym's CRM. The CRM automatically sends you a welcome email and a reminder to visit. If you don't visit, it might send a follow-up email a few days later with a special introductory offer to entice you to join.
For almost all businesses, it is cheaper to keep an existing customer than find a new one. CRM helps businesses personalise their service to build loyalty and keep as many existing customers as possible.
Example: Tesco Clubcard is perhaps the best-known example of a CRM-powered loyalty card system. It doesn't just give points; it sends coupons for products you actually buy (e.g., "50p off Oat Milk"). This personalisation locks you into shopping at Tesco. It is marketing automation in action.
CRM systems are used to capture the details of people who have shown some interest in the business, creating a list of potential leads for follow up.
Example: a software company like Adobe offers a free online tutorial for its Photoshop software. To access the tutorial, you have to register with your email address. Your details are captured in Adobe's CRM as a new 'lead'. You will then likely receive marketing emails about Photoshop features and subscription offers.
CRM helps a sales team track a lead through every stage of the sales process to make sure opportunities aren't missed.
Example: the Adobe sales team can see in the CRM that a lead from the tutorial has now visited the pricing page three times and downloaded a brochure. The CRM can automatically score this person as a 'hot lead'. This signals to a salesperson that now would be a good time to call them to discuss their needs and try to complete the sale.
Tesco's Clubcard, first launched in 1995, remains one of the most-cited real-world CRM examples because of how directly it links customer data to personalised marketing — analysing what a shopper buys to send genuinely relevant money-off coupons, rather than generic discounts. Tesco has also used Clubcard data to introduce "Clubcard Prices", where some products are cheaper only for Clubcard holders, directly encouraging shoppers to register their data with the business in exchange for lower prices — a clear illustration of how a CRM system can be used for both customer retention and, in effect, further data-driven customer acquisition.
Source: verified via search, September 2026 — widely reported UK retail press coverage of Tesco Clubcard's history and the more recent "Clubcard Prices" scheme.
Duolingo's habit-forming features (its daily streak counter, push notifications and its well-known "sad owl" reminder emails) have been widely discussed in tech and psychology commentary as an example of "gamified" retention — using the same kind of behavioural nudges as a loyalty scheme to keep users returning daily. Duolingo has continued to lean into this approach even as some users and commentators have raised concerns about how much pressure the streak system can create, directly reflecting the "arguments for vs against" tension this lesson's STAR Task asks students to weigh up.
Source: verified via search, September 2026 — widely reported technology and consumer-app press coverage of Duolingo's streak and notification features and the public discussion around them.
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Customer Relationship Management.
Capturing the details of people who have shown interest in the business.
It's cheaper to keep an existing customer than to find a new one.
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Connecting to market segmentation (earlier in 3.1.3): A CRM system is essentially a tool for applying segmentation at the level of an individual customer, rather than a broad group — instead of just knowing that "18-30 year olds" like a product, a business's CRM can track that a specific customer prefers a specific product category, letting it personalise marketing far more precisely than segmentation alone. Strong answers can explain CRM as segmentation taken to its most detailed, individual level.
Don't describe CRM only in positive terms in an "assess" or "evaluate" question — the drawbacks (cost, staff training, data privacy and security risk, and loss of human interaction) are just as creditworthy as the benefits, and a one-sided answer will struggle to reach the top mark band, which usually requires a balanced judgement.
Before using this: AI tools can get facts or mark scheme details wrong, and quality varies by tool. Always check anything factual against your notes or ask your teacher.
Give me a short scenario about a business using a CRM system for one of: customer acquisition, retention, lead generation, or pipeline management. Ask me to identify which of the four it is and explain how it works in that scenario, then check whether I've correctly distinguished it from the other three uses of CRM.